User talk:Jguk/admin criterion

Welcome to the discussion

With all due respect, I think this is absurd. Writing featured articles is good, but it does not meaningfully connect with the responsibilities of being an admin. Snowspinner 16:03, Feb 27, 2005 (UTC)

I think it's a good idea. I've nominated two articles for featured-article status, one successful and one not, and emerged from the process both times battered, bruised, and exhausted, but both experiences were extremely helpful in teaching me how to write better articles, and in showing what the community expects. I feel this does connect with the responsibilities of adminship: admins who know how to write good encyclopedia articles will be better at empathizing with others who are trying to do the same. I would perhaps weaken the criterion a little to say that an admin must have helped to nominate an article for FAS, but need not have succeeded: if success is the criterion, people trying to stop that person becoming an admin might vote against the article for that reason alone, which would interfere with the FAS process. SlimVirgin 18:01, Feb 27, 2005 (UTC)

I'm afraid that I tend to agree with Snowspinner on this. SlimVirgin's modification is an improvement, but it's not clear to me that featured articles are at all central to Wikipedia (to be honest, in all the time that I've used and edited Wikipedia – the latter only about three or four months, but the former much longer – I've never looked at a featured article), nor do I have the slightest interest in creating or nominating one. My interest is in making Wikipedia a good, accurate, readable encyclopædia; in so far as the business of featured articles coincides with that, then fine (I'm not against them, just not interested). If someone held my view, would that really make them unfit for adminship?
Having said all that, it's unlikely that I'd be nominated for adminship, nor do I intend nominating myself, so you might find my comments irrelevant. Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 18:25, 27 Feb 2005 (UTC)

It's not the featured status of the featured articles that matters here. It's that those articles are meant to be examples of what all Wikipedia articles should be: well written, accurate, well-referenced, and aesthetically pleasing. I'd say that it's better to have admins who can do this than to have admins who can't, given that we're producing an encyclopedia, and given that any enforcement of rules should be to that end. The most efficient way to judge whether an admin can do that is to find out whether they have, in fact, done it; and the most efficient way to judge whether they have done it is to see whether they've put an article through the featured-article process, where there are editors who have experience in judging quality from different perspectives e.g. image-use, use of references, narrative structure. In other words, the featured-article criterion would simply be a short-cut way of judging whether the admin can do what we're all supposed to be trying to do. SlimVirgin 18:52, Feb 27, 2005 (UTC)

But this is an example of a standard fallacy (at least, in Jguk's formulation). It's the same logical form as:

Communists believe in equality
You believe in equality
Therefore
You're a communist.

That is, it moves from saying:

everyone with one quality (being a communist or bringing an article to featured status) has a second quality (believing in equality, or having the qualities needed for a good admin)

to saying:

only people with the first quality have the second.

If the business about featured articles were taken to be just one indicator of admin-worthiness, then fine (though I'd still deny that it was a sufficient condition), but to take it as a necessary condition is surely misguided. Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 19:24, 27 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Hard to count the suppressed premises and begged questions. ;-) What I'm saying is that everyone who has taken an article through FAS is likely to have one quality that I regard as a necessary condition, namely that they can write good encyclopedia articles. As we're writing an encyclopedia, that for me is the most important quality in any editor allowed to enforce rules. It's not a sufficient condition because people who write good articles might still be shits, so other criteria are needed. (Side note: people who genuinely believe in equality arguably wouldn't want to become admins.) As Jguk says, there are already a lot of admins (I read somewhere there are 400), so we can afford to be picky; yet some of those who are nominated have done little more than thousands of minor house-keeping edits, and they tend to get adminship simply because they've never been involved in controversial articles, and therefore haven't had edit disputes or made enemies. The current process almost rewards a lack of engagement. SlimVirgin 20:22, Feb 27, 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for the comments so far - remember this is only one guy's criterion, not a policy proposal. My view is that we have plenty of admins, and so can be picky; and the qualities needed to create a featured article are approximately all the qualities we would want in an admin. It dispenses with the nominations by newbies easily, and has a qualititative approach that those with "edit count" criteria do not have. For good housekeeping editors, they may get one oppose, but that's not a big deal (1) the oppose vote can only be a decider in a close case; and (2) we have plenty of good admins already. But I am reading the comments and will consider some modification of my criterion in the light of them. All the best, jguk 19:51, 27 Feb 2005 (UTC)

I just read this, and realised that under these criteria, I *still* wouldn't be an admin. Tim Rhymeless (Er...let's shimmy) 20:04, 27 Feb 2005 (UTC)

I'm curious about why you think we have plenty of admins, because that's not my impression. What "plenty" means must of course be relative to what is needed, and I feel we need more admins doing RC-patrolling, helping newcomers, vfd'ing, blockings, copy-vio hunting/listing/deleting, spamblocking and all that boring stuff that admins often have better powers/skills for doing. When you go RC-patrolling for instance, do you feel that there are too many people doing it and that you are going in each others way? I certainly rarely notice that. I've been doing lots of it the last months, and sometimes there are so much vandalism needing reverts, fresh users needing attention, people who should have been blocked, images that should have been deleted, etc that I feel bad just going to sleep. Cause I know that chances are nobody will notice the vandalism etc continue. The vandalism in progress page is, of course, useful, but in my experience it takes time to both write the notice and to reach admins that way, simply because there are too few admins watching. The worst periods are when the servers are slow, as they have been lately. Then it seems both admins and none-admins are slacking on the RC-checking and pages stay with vandalism or test-edits for many hours or days until they are randomly discovered on someones watchlist or by a casual reader. It shouldn't be like that, and having more admins would help on the problem. So, I am surprised seeing anyone thinking we have plenty of admins, when I so strongly feel the opposite is the case. Shanes 21:53, 27 Feb 2005 (UTC)

I must admit that I've found the same. The Copyright Violations page is particularly behind; pages that I flagged, and for which users have provided new stubs or even complete articles, are still hanging around as copyvios because no-one's got around to them. Also, if there were more admins, there'd be less need for making the choice between doing the job properly and actually writing articles. Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 23:16, 27 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Well, I'll have to see what to do if a candidate comes along and says, well I'd really like to concentrate on deleting copyright violations. I don't ever recall seeing one personally. Perhaps that's a question to ask the new candidates - whether they'd be willing to deal with the backlog? jguk 00:08, 28 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Perhaps that's the problem: people who enjoy doing things like getting articles to Featured status aren't the sort of people who are prepared to spend time on boring admin jobs... Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 00:32, 28 Feb 2005 (UTC)

More to the point, the "admin" status is best known for the blocking ability and the sexy quick rollback. Maybe we should advertise for those interested in dealing with the nonsexy grunt work? jguk 07:25, 28 Feb 2005 (UTC)

How about a sub-category of admins? No powers to do the 'sexy' things, but the power to do the tedious chores? I don't envision people signing up because they're eager to do the work, but a public-spirited user could adopt a particular housekeeping duty (say, dealing with copyvios), and do a few whenever she feels like it. Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 10:12, 28 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Yeah, I wouldn't mind being one of those maintenance admins. As it is, people make a big deal out of RFA because of the suspicion of ulterior motives. What are the most controversial actions that an admin takes? Blocking. Blocking often involves a subjective judgment of whether someone is acting in bad faith. VFD, copyvio maintenance, etc. involve more objective decisions, and there is probably a larger number of Wikipedians who can be trusted with those powers. Rad Racer 23:29, 28 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I'm going to have to disagree with this policy. There are many types of contributors on Wikipedia (WikiGnomes, for example) who do a lot of responsible hard work, and could use more powerful tools to do their jobs. -- Phyzome is Tim McCormack 02:24, 2005 Mar 24 (UTC)

Thank you for your comment. However, I am not proposing it as a Wikipedia, just a personal policy - and it's one I adopt in knowledge that my one vote can only swing things if the decision to make someone an admin is marginal, jguk 06:21, 24 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I'm with Phyzome in that I think it's silly to be judged by criteria which, even if I were to seek becoming an admin, I wouldn't even be shooting for. (I also agree with Snowspinner in that your criterion has nothing to do with admin responsibilities.) Don't get me wrong, I don't mind at all your vote to oppose me, it's just that I didn't notice your policy until now. But, I mean, it's kind of hard to conform to a standard I didn't even know about, yeah? Basically your voting, whatever the reasoning behind it is, amounts to "if you don't help make a featured article, you shouldn't be an admin", which surely isn't what you mean? - furrykef (Talk at me) 08:37, 24 Apr 2005 (UTC)

RFA and FAC

I've been thinking, applying for adminship is a lot like submitting a featured article candidate. Both require significant preparation, both are decided by vote, both allow for resubmission later, and the standards for both are continually rising. The only difference is that for RFA, there's no opportunity for peer review before applying, so people stumble into it without realizing that leaving off the edit histories for the past 1,000 edits probably hurt their chances. Rad Racer 13:46, 30 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Ambiguities

I think before you start putting your admin criteria into effect (which you've already prematurely started doing) you should iron out a lot of ambiguities in your requirements. Your only criteria right now is "The candidate must have helped get at least one article up to featured article status." Now what exactly do you mean by "helped get"? Does that mean if one makes a minor spelling edit to an article at any point in time and that article eventually gets featured article status, then they reach your criteria? If not, where do you draw the line at how much work someone has to do? At least 100 words added? At least five edits? It's amazing to me you're not clear at all on this. What if I have 50 articles that I made that come very close to featured article status but none make it? That's more FA experience than most will ever get. Will you deny that person admin status? What if a person put forth extensive effort to get an article to featured article status but never say so on their user page. Do you have a method to check this? Do you ask the user? What if that user did on another user name they used to have? How will you know? What if a user, who has not contributed to a featured article yet, has a page being voted on for featured article status but they are also being voted for admin, how will you vote? These a just a few of the things that need to be specified since you do not explicitly go into detail about how you decide whether or not someone meets your criteria. — oo64eva (AJ) ^{(U | T | C)} @ 17:12, Apr 24, 2005 (UTC)

Why is one who doesn't meet your criterion unfit?

You have on this page argued for why you think that a person who helps in producing a featured article is fit for adminship. Can you also explain why you think that a person who has not aided in producing a featured article is unfit for adminship? An oppose vote is quite powerful, since it cancels out four support votes, and such votes should not be cast lightly. Sjakkalle (Check!) 12:51, 9 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I think we have more than enough admins (at least enough for us to be a little picky). I have also seen some (a small number of) admins who are clearly not really suited to the role, and yet they are effectively impossible to remove. It's therefore fair to have criteria that err slightly on the side of caution and therefore my criterion is such that I feel it will all but guarantee that we get sensible admins. Without some content rules it is possible for someone to hang around for three months, make 3,000 really minor and insignificant edits, and suddenly have the power to block and quick-revert good article-writing admins. Kind regards, jguk 13:00, 9 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for answering. I don't agree with you, but at least you've explained. Sjakkalle (Check!) 13:05, 9 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I like this

I have to say, your rationale as to why this criterion exists is fantastic. I don't feel it addresses everything, but I believe it's certainly one of the most important factors involved. Having contributed to five Featured articles, three passes and two failures, I can say that out of the other end of each, there's not simply a sense of endorsement (which isn't a good thing for an admin, as humility is required in any role of authority) but there's truly a depth of greater knowledge and understanding of the policies, people and their respective expectations. --linca linca 13:18, 31 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]